by Edward Ring
Unprecedentedly high tariffs on imports from China are the latest escalation in a new cold war that may eventually turn hot, a war that we could lose. The new “adversary” is China, a fascist, racist, expansionist, deceitful, dishonest, and manipulative superpower that wants to impose on the whole world the authoritarian hellscape it’s imposed on its own population.
For the skeptics and the appeasers who don’t think China is a serious threat, or that human rights in China are no better or worse than they are here in America, it’s time to resurrect arguments from the last Cold War, arguments that worked then and ought to work now: America is a mess. A flawed, divided, fractious, chaotic melange of oligarchs and jingoists, crackers and crips, soft corporate censorship and bureaucratic gridlock, with bursting prisons and broken ghettos, with wealth inequality and simmering racial tension. We’re not perfect!
But guess what? The choice between starting a new life in China versus coming to America has never been easier. If you chant “Death to America” in Times Square, you’ll live to chant another day. If you chant “Death to China” in Tiananmen Square, assuming you’re not immediately dead with your internal organs earning foreign currency, you’ll go to prison for a very long time.
In response to America’s new tariffs, a recent Chinese video has gone viral, depicting Americans—all of them obese—working in sweatshops. With expressions of apathy and resignation, legions of Americans operate soldering irons and sewing machines, doing the jobs that Chinese workers used to do for them. The message, intended to mock the Trump Administration’s efforts to bring manufacturing back to the United States, is amazingly tone-deaf. Because what this video is really admitting is that “our citizens are automatons; underpaid, grotesquely exploited slaves.”
But China’s interests aren’t just being promoted by the Chinese. Right in there with China, agreeing with that message are some of the most influential forces in America. It’s quite a coalition.
Libertarianism, Inc. Conservatism, Inc., Neoliberals. Neoconservatives. Never Trumpers. Democrats. Globalists. The entire media industrial complex.
It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that none of these coalition members care about workers toiling in Chinese sweatshops any more than they ever cared about abandoned American workers left in rust belt towns with nothing left for them but drugs and despair.
“Learn to code,” quipped Biden. “Free movement of capital,” proclaimed libertarians, equally indifferent. And so from the corporate left and from the libertarian right came the same endorsement: China, you may enslave your entire population to bring labor costs down, heavily subsidize your export industries to bring costs down even further, and then manipulate your currency to bring costs down further still in order to target strategic industries in the United States and all but destroy them. It isn’t just American jobs that China killed. They conned us into allowing our pharmaceutical and steel industries, along with dozens of other essential industries, to be voluntarily obliterated.
Cheap drugs. Cheap steel. Until China pulls the plug. And they will.
The “free trade” coalition cheered for this Chinese coup every step of the way. “Gains of trade.” “Comparative advantage.” As for human rights in China or disappearing jobs in America? Never mind all that. And even now, as war with China could erupt tomorrow, they’re pedantically referring us to Adam Smith. Remember that? Wine from France. Wool from Scotland. Trade! As if these concepts they cling to are beyond criticism, immune to nuance, or unfamiliar to anyone who questions the idea of selling our nation to Chinese fascists.
Institutional resistance to Trump’s tariffs is just the latest example of how free trade fundamentalism has corrupted politics in the United States for many decades. When Biden opened the borders to allow entry to hordes of unskilled workers, many from nations and cultures that may prove to be utterly incompatible with our own, this same crowd stood on the sidelines and applauded. Apparently, they think “borders” are obsolete. Making common cause with malevolent leftists that want to destroy everything we believe in and everything that’s made our nation great, for the most part, free trade fundamentalists are also the people who apparently think the very idea of borders, language, and culture defining a nation is “tribal” and obsolete. We must allow “free movement of people,” and, no big deal, we’ll just fix the welfare state later.
Like their communist nemesis that adroitly uses them as dupes, free trade fundamentalists don’t see nations; they see economic units. We are all interchangeable parts. For the communists, it’s the workers international. For the free trade crowd, it’s a world of “free agents” where the “non-aggression principle” governs smooth social functioning based on mutual transactions between peaceful parties. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could base free trade policies on something so out of touch with reality, but if you reject the non-aggression principle as not applicable in the real world, logic would have you also reject free trade in favor of reciprocal trade.
Reciprocal trade means that if, through regulations, restrictions on investment, exclusion from judicial recourse, tariffs, subsidies, and currency manipulation, a nation is erecting barriers to imports, then in response you must erect reciprocal barriers until a mutually beneficial understanding is reached. Otherwise, your nation hemorrhages jobs, eviscerates its vital industries, sells off its assets, and eventually becomes a hollowed-out, powerless shell, ripe for final conquest.
Without reciprocity, the ideal of “free trade” is not just trite. It’s a death sentence for its adherents if other powerful nations nonetheless use aggressive tactics in their trade policies. And that would be China. So maybe the anti-tariff coalition of corporate libertarians, corporate conservatives, neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, Never Trumpers, Democrats, globalists, and the entire media industrial complex should ask themselves some tough questions.
How do we intend to deal with the fascist regime that has enslaved the Chinese people and is bent on enslaving the entire world? While they sell us cheap flat screens and antibiotics, shall we continue to allow them to run psyops on the American people, steal our technology, infiltrate our institutions, and use their trade surplus dollars to buy strategic real estate in America and every piece of American technology they can’t steal?
Facing this reality is tough. What if the Chinese military, for years, has been infiltrating strategic choke points around the world with trained agents? For example, what if the Canal Zone in Panama is crawling with Chinese “civilian contractors,” ready to blow up the locks the day we resupply Taiwan to help them resist an invasion? Free trade and the non-aggression principle aren’t bad ideas, but when it comes to geopolitics, they have no utility, either.
People are aggressive and tribal by nature. The Chinese government is an aggressive actor in a world of aggressive actors. The free trade fundamentalists are invited to cite one single example from history where a passive nation that had something an aggressive nation wanted was permitted to retain that something—land, resources, technology, you name it. It has never, ever happened, and it never will. China, ruled by what is probably the most tribalist, aggressive regime in the world today, wants to replace America as the global hegemon. Everything they do is in pursuit of that goal. Either we stop them, or they will control the world.
Critics of high tariffs on Chinese imports may either continue to deny this geopolitical reality or they must explain how we’re supposed to bring our pharmaceutical and steel industries back to America without tariffs and, if necessary, subsidies for essential industries.
We are in a new cold war that may make the last one we fought (1945-1989) look easy. To win, we must strengthen our alliances with friendly nations, and maybe, only maybe, we could work on that with more finesse than we are currently seeing coming out of Washington. But no matter what, America needs to decouple from China, and we need to rebuild our vital industries. The free trade fundamentalists are not helping.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Photo “Xi Jinping” by UN Geneva. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
